Tasha Jun

She stood next to me, towering over me. My legs swung back and forth from the playground bench, trying to stay in rhythm with the nearby slap-slap sound of a jump rope smacking the blacktop, again and again.
She told us she was going to be a model. I believed she would be and easily could be. The rest of the girls with us agreed. She was ...

Last week, my oldest dropped one of our drinking glasses on the floor. It slipped from his fingers like a ghost. He’s at the age when independence and dependence keep showing up for a game of tug-of-war, and it's keeping all of us on our toes. I watched his eyes pop like a puffer fish as the blue Ball jar transformed into a million shards and flew ...

Our family built a raised bed garden this spring. We talked about the idea of it for months prior, teeter-tottering between dreams and hesitations. In my daydreams, I imagined how it would serve as both a guide and needed distraction to some of the challenges we’ve been facing as a family.
But the truth that’s haunted this dream of a garden is ...

She scurried over to the rice cooker and opened it. Using a rice paddle to scoop out a few grains of day-old rice with her right hand, she then picked them off of the paddle with her left, squishing them together between her slender thumb and forefinger. I watched her move quickly and silently, her dark eyes focused and on task.
I am the ...

I rubbed my bulging stomach, trying to appease the skin that was stretched and desiccated, begging me for assurance. We were expecting our first child, and at that point in building our baby registry, my mind was whirling. I wanted to hide from the bright white lights of the colossal store, but they reached into every aisle and reflected their ...

I can picture the paragraph in my seventh grade year book. The message from my friend made a rounded square, and the letters themselves were bubbly, expressive, and crowded together like a group of junior high schoolers. After the expected, “I hope you have a great summer,” she wrote, “I knew you were cool the day you told so-and-so to shut ...

While she was still in Korea, our daughter went to a weekly playgroup with other kids like her, who were in the process of being adopted. When we came to bring her home, the adoption agency that had become part of her regular community gave us a little photo book with a cheerful yellow cover and English words and phrases spread throughout it like, ...

I can’t remember a day in my house of upbringing without a rice cooker sitting proud amidst all of the lesser appliances in our kitchen. Day after day, it poured steam from its lid while it popped hard short grain rice into perfect white pillows. It was always toiling. We had rice with almost every dinner, no matter what kind of dinner it was, even ...

I sat alone on the last leg of the journey, gazing out a scratched plane window at clouded pieces of California. Someone pinned a pair of shiny plastic wings onto my shirt so that the flight attendants would know I was alone in the sky for the stretch between LAX and Santa Maria.
Throughout the flight, I swung my legs and fiddled with the wings ...

I am still the fifth-grade girl who ran into her room to bury her face into a pillow. I lay there, letting sobs spill from my eyes like water just released from a dam. Salty tears fastened clumps of thick black hair to my cheeks. I let the chunky pieces stay there like a surrender of sorts. I was too tired to push it away, the God-given hair I ...